Monday, April 03, 2006

FIRE COLLEGE !sadly i'm not clever enough to hi-jack college computers with my camera & shop you photos , but this place is NUTS.first the journey, yes 14 hours to get from sunny village of the damned to...whereever we are in England, moreton on marsh. we were about to take off in our ikkle eastern airways plane from Inverness, when Lo... one propeller started making a nasty clonking noise & wouldnt turn. many many hours later they flew us to manchester instead of birmingham in another plane, then eventually buses us to birmingham, where our car then took us to Moreton. Apparently its an old RAF base, & at 11 last night i thought i'd walked into boot camp from hell. Its huge, the uniformed bloke who greeted us was terrifying & the gaggles of drunk uniformed police cadets didnt inspire me with much either.This morning the 23 students on this officers course gathered, their gold stripes & general bling uniforms glistening almost enough to drown out my moth eaten dog haired non-rank no-stripes status. " yes i'm watch commander at so-&-so , we get 12 000 calls a year "... er "i'm vicky no-rank, i get around 30 ". I then spend an hour or two being completely freeked by listening to an 'intro' in a trillion things i'd never heard of, it was an anacronym anoraks heaven.However when we joined into smaller groups, our "watch " for the next week, alles became a bit clarer. in my crew we have a completely intimidating bunch of experts, you may have seen them on the news at major famous disasters. However so far so good, no-ones rolling their eyes or laughing at me, and i seem to be holding my own. The practical facility here is the best in europe, the fire-ground is huge, it has a fake commercial building, house, substation, ship, jet, five other sizeplanes, motorways a level crossing & train crash, tankers left right & centre , theres a spectactuar collapsed multi story building, and apparently tomorrow we get to use real water & real foam , in real smoke n fire. Ive never seen anything like it , its like DISASTER town. wierdly enough they actually had a real plane crash once into the field with pretend crashed planes. spooky !right my friends, i must away to the pool. tough i know. farethewell.